From a young Nazi to a tacit collaborator with the Argentinean Junta

It appears the one Holy, Catholic, Apostolic Church cannot produce a Pope with clean hands, with hands unsullied by inquisitions, mass terror and murder. As Annette Langer of Der Spiegel has recently reported, not every Argentinean celebrated Jorge Mario Bergoglio‘s election, and with good cause:

“I can’t believe it. I’m so distressed and full of anger that I don’t know what to do,” wrote the sister of deceased priest and torture victim Orlando Yorio in an e-mail to the journalist Horacio Berbitsky. “Now he’s achieved what he wanted.”

“He,” for Graciela Yorio, refers to a power-hungry man who betrayed her brother and the Hungarian Jesuit Franz Jalics to Argentina’s mililtary dictatorshop (sic). A man who did nothing to stop the two faithful from being locked up in prison for five months and tortured. “He” is Pope Francis, then still known as Jorge Mario Bergoglio, provincial of the Argentine Jesuits.

The two liberation theologists were kidnapped on May 23, 1976 in a slum where they were doing ministry and social work. “Many people politically associated with the extreme right viewed our presence in the poor districts with suspicion,” recalled Jalics later in his writings. “They interprested (sic) the fact that we lived there as support of the guerrillas, and they denounced us as terrorists.”

The regime’s henchmen brought the two Jesuits to the Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA), a detention center notorious for torture. After five months they were thrown out onto a field half-naked and pumped full of drugs. The priests complained of Bergoglio to Superior General Pedro Arrupe in Rome. But they had already been expelled from the Jesuit order, allegedly due to contact with woman and “conflicts of obedience.”

Bergolio dismissed the two priests before their arrest, a fact that, when considered along with Bergolio’s conservatism, compromises and, perhaps, undermines the post facto defense of the new Pope.